I’ve been sitting here thinking about what to get my 8 yr old boy for xmas and in the back of my mind I am very thankful to still have a boy at all. Earlier today A gunman stormed a school building out on the east coast and murdered a lot of people. He wasn’t a ‘criminal’ and he wasn’t the person ‘you’d expect’ as if these things could be predicted. He was an angry 20 yr old who murdered his parents and in the process of doing so, took the lives ov many children.
I don’t care what his parents did to make him feel the need to take their lives, he did not have to kill those children. There is no reason I can think of that this Christmas should be a time of pain an mourning for any family let alone the many affected by this tragedy. Worse still, there is no justice here; no answers are forthcoming. The gunman took his own life at the scene, so we will never be able to string him up, to have the parents look him in the eye and say how it felt to lose their child. No catharsis can occur because he stole that from the families as well.
There are not a lot of words I can say tonight to reflect the horror that occurred. I will say this: I grieve for the parents who lost their loved ones today. A tragedy like this does not need to happen. I hope that this will not be politicized. I hope that it doesn’t become the rallying cry for one side or the other to change rules. The fact is a lone gunman cannot be stopped so long as he is willing to sacrifice himself in the process. We have seen that time and time again in these instances. It is not the time to preach policy. It is the time to stand beside those who are affected by this tragedy and do what we can to help them survive these dark days.